Grace Kelly Knows Best
“Please, Miss Kelly,” said the trembling boy, knees knocking above his white bucks, “I hate to bother you, but if you could just put this on for a minute and pose with me I can pledge my fraternity.” He held out a girl’s white sweater.
Grace Kelly stopped dead in her tracks in the lobby of The Manor, a stately old hotel on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, and took the sweater from his hand. It was obvious that it would have been a scandalously tight fit on a 12-year-old. “Where are you from?” she demanded.
“Colby College. I came all the way from Maine. I can’t get pledged without the picture,” he wailed, gazing at the blank faces around him. Several of the faces switched to a threatening expression and moved closer.
“Now, leave him alone,” Grace said. “I know how fraternities are.” She turned to the boy. “I’m certainly not going to get into this, but you phone your pledge master and ask him if we can pose together, holding the sweater.”
“Gee!” said the boy. He made the phone call and a few minutes later took his place beside Grace, who posed primly, holding the offending sweater at a respectable distance, with shocked fingertips.
As the boy left the lobby, clutching his roll of film, she sighed and shook her head. “This,” she said, “is certainly my month for college boys!”
Grace Kelly: In private the cool, classic beauty dissolves into a warm, impulsive woman who delights the camera with a fresh mood
That morning a delegation from North Carolina had showed up to present her with the title of Miss Homecoming and a request to be present when their team played the nation’s toughest eleven—Maryland. The week before a dozen stalwarts from Clemson Agricultural College, S. C., had terrified the desk clerk into admitting them to Grace’s presence. There they had not committed assault, but announced that she had been voted Miss Personality Plus of 1955, and withdrew in good order. Ten seniors from Furman University in Greenville drove over one Sunday with a plaque stating that they considered her their Dream Girl of the year, and the Asheville prep school threw discretion to the winds and proclaimed her Miss Everything!
It was all very flattering, but it had its ironic side as well. For these collegiate and crew-cut lads—plus her father—made up the sum total of Grace’s male visitors during the entire stay on location.
Not that there hadn’t been fun. You can’t assemble a cast consisting of Alec Guinness, Jesse Royce Landis and Louis Jourdan and expect everyone to remain straight-faced. Grace had been known (though not till the joke was over) to sneak off to the telegraph office and dispatch several impassioned and love-struck wires to Guinness, signed, mysteriously, “Alice.” There had been long walks in the countryside, sight-seeing excursions with Papa Kelly, sociable evenings. But men? Nary a one.
Grace Kelly appeals to men as a Challenge. Which lucky fellow will break down her reserve? Which one will make the lady laugh, or cry or love? Grace’s charms lie in her rarely expressed, but potently suggested inner life. That life, as shown here, proves Miss Kelly can be as flirtatious, kittenish, impulsive, dreamy as any other well-brought-up young woman her age.
Kelly is a hard worker always. But in the past she had invariably found a few spare minutes for safariing with Gable, lunching with Crosby, dining out with Oleg Cassini. There had always been at least enough casual dates to produce rumors of serious romance.
Every night in North Carolina Grace was early-to-bed. Of course, she was required to be early-to-rise as well. Shortly after dawn, six days a week, she delivered herself into the hands of make-up men and hairdressers, and sat sleepily while they fussed over her with powder puffs and combs, sneaking sips from her second cup of coffee when they paused for breath. Finished, she would peer at herself through half-closed eyes and wander off in the direction of the set, where, minutes later, she appeared before the cameras, miraculously wide-awake, and beautiful.
At times she felt as though the whole responsibility for this production rested with her. For it had been her idea entirely. Wanting to free-lance, but unable to break her contract with Metro, feeling strongly that her best films had been made outside her home studio, she finally did something positive about the unhappy situation. She walked into Dore Schary’s office, a copy of Molnar’s famous play, The Swan, in her hand, and announced she wanted to play the princess. Schary hadn’t read the play since high school, but he was as anxious as Grace to find a script that would satisfy them both. He reread the work, phoned Grace and said, “All right, we’ll make it.”
The cast had been drawn from Broadway, France, England, some two million dollars budgeted, location trips mapped out ‘and accomplished. And it was all her baby.
Married?
Of course you can’t convince all of the people all of the time that a beautiful woman goes to sleep at ten because she wants to be clear-eyed the next day. There were those who said that Grace was hibernating out of respect to Jean-Pierre Aumont, her great love and even possibly her secret husband. For it was true that Jean-Pierre had followed Grace across the Atlantic, had admitted that his heart was hers—and that Grace had returned to the States wearing a double gold band on the important third finger. Lensmen who promptly aimed cameras at it were asked to wait. “I want to cover it with tape,” Grace said.
“Tape?” they said, but they waited—people do wait for Grace.
“Why don’t you take it off?” someone suggested.
Grace smiled sweetly. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to take it off.”
The ring has since been uncovered and transferred to the right hand, but never explained.
But to all inquiries Grace replied calmly and consistently, “No, positively no serious romance with Mr. Aumont. No serious romance with anyone.” And when the shooting at Asheville was concluded and Grace dropped off in Philadelphia to visit her folks she never once dropped by the Locust Street Theatre where Jean-Pierre was starring in a show called The Heavenly Twins. She said a quick, affectionate hello and goodbye to the Kelly clan and then took off for Hollywood. The only time she mentioned Aumont was when a friend asked her if he danced well. “I wouldn’t know,” Grace said. “I only danced with him once, and that just briefly!” Which came as something of a surprise to those who remembered Elsa Maxwell’s reports that when she was their hostess on the Riviera, Grace and Jean-Pierre danced together constantly—and didn’t sit out the other numbers with anyone else, either.
What Kelly wants
Nor did her subsequent behavior in Hollywood indicate that she was preparing for the role of housekeeper and mother. With her she took, not a cookbook, but the script of High Society, the musical version of The Philadelphia Story, which will probably be her next picture. John Patrick, playwright of The Teahouse Of The August Moon, and Cole Porter had been engaged to do the script and the music. Only Grace, besides the MGM front office, knew that the studio hoped to cast Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the parts originally played by James Stewart and Cary Grant. When that film is complete, Designing Woman, co-starring Jimmy Stewart, is scheduled. And after that—a play.
Not that she has one yet. But her chin sets when she mentions it, and what Kelly wants—you know. So sure is she that nothing will stop her from making her Broadway debut that she has given up her small New York apartment on 66th Street and signed a three-year lease for a sumptuous eight-room flat on Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art—an apartment meant to be lived in. Kelly does not expect her show to fold. She plans on a record run. No one, no man, no romance, is going to interfere with that. Kelly knows.
THE END
—BY SUSAN WENDER
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956
